No People Allowed

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by
subscribing now.

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by
subscribing now.

OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about a radical environmental group in the southwest, the Center for Biological Diversity and one of its leaders, Kieran Suckling... Mentions the center's attempt to prosecute people when they kill attacking wolves from a rare species... Writer describes Suckling as a trickster, philosopher, publicity hound, master strategist, and unapologetic pain in the ass... What’s unusual about the center is not so much its agenda, which is shared by the rest of the so-called deep-ecology wing of the environmental movement, as its effectiveness... In 1995, it persuaded a federal judge to enjoin, for more than a year, all commercial forestry in the United States Forest Service’s Region 3 ... The injunction dealt what will probably be a mortal blow to commercial logging in the Southwest. Suckling and the two other principal figures at the center, Peter Galvin and Robin Silver, say they don’t want to eliminate logging—just logging whose goal is to cut down big trees. Their views about ranching—the center’s next target—are less subtle. “You cannot ranch economically in the desert without devastating the ecology,” Suckling says....After ranching comes development. The center blocked the construction of a high school in Tucson. It helped force the University of Arizona to scale down severely a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory complex. It is trying to prevent new golf courses from being built in Palm Springs, California, and high-end gated communities in San Diego. It is a prominent member of a coalition of groups whose determined and furious opposition on behalf of several rare-bird species finally caused DreamWorks SKG to abandon plans to build an old-fashioned Hollywood studio complex on wetlands... Mentions that they have come to alienate not only loggers, ranchers and developers but members of the established, liberal environmental movement... Suckling, Galvin, and Silver have been threatened, their offices and homes burgled and vandalized. Once, a government lawyer lost it in a meeting with them and head-butted one of their lawyers... The center’s enemies aren’t wrong to perceive it as a threat. It acts on behalf of plants and animals (it is now campaigning for the reintroduction of jaguars and grizzly bears), but if it keeps winning the immediate impact will be on people. Settlements would be reduced, structures would be taken down, jobs would be lost. “We will have to inflict severe economic pain,” Robin Silver told me. “We’d like to see belly-high grass over millions of acres,” Peter Galvin added... Describes Suckling's early life, and his playful modification of Heidigger's anti-technological philosophy... Describes his work with Earth First! and the revelation he experienced when hearing of the Endangered Species Act... Suckling, Galvin, and Silver realized that it would be possible to obtain endangered-species designations for dozens of species, whose critical habitat, if put together, would represent a significant portion of the Southwest.... The center’s ideas about the moral superiority of untouched nature to human civilization seem commonplace, but they’re actually rather new... Describes the history of the idea, beginning in the 18th century, with Thoreau... Tells about the antipathy between the U.S. Forest Service and the center... Describes the center's triumph in saving the pygmy owl and its current fight over the San Pedro River... The center is at the peak of its influence, a perilous place to be... If you deconstructed the center’s activities, you might conclude that it is part of the entirely human ecology of a region where it isn’t possible for people not to be in charge. The human ecology of the Southwest has got out of balance, because the Center for Biological Diversity has been spectacularly good at amassing disproportionate power for itself. In the end, perhaps, other humans will figure out how to reduce the center’s power... Tells about a move afoot in Washington by Sen. Domenici of New Mexico to change the Endangered Species Act... The old-line environmental groups have been warning Suckling for years that he was going to overplay his hand and get the Endangered Species Act watered down, and now it looks as though they may have been right.... [But] as a result of the center...people who want to use the land to make money have less influence; people who want to preserve it as an aesthetic treasure have more influence.